Anonymous leaks government docs in support of Pirate Bay cofounder

The latest operation by hacker collective Anonymous involves the unlikely combination of Cambodia, cyberwar, and contemporary blackmail. The group has leaked a massive collection of documents from the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, embarrassing the governments of India, Nepal, the Ukraine, Russia, and of course, Cambodia, in retaliation for the arrest of a controversial website founder who had gone into hiding in Phnom Penh.

It’s war, and as is traditional with 21st-century war, everyone needs an introduction to the protagonists.

In one corner, we have Anonymous, its leak site Par:AnoIA, and media site Cyberguerrilla. In the other corner, we have the government of Cambodia. In the middle, playing the role of the rope in this tug-of-war, we have Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a Swedish national and cofounder of the Internet’s largest BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay.

A long memory and a short fuse characterize the hydra-headed group which has long supported The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated to TPB) and opposed handshake diplomacy and backroom geopolitical gaming. When Svartholm, who had been living quietly in Cambodia, was arrested two weeks ago, members of Anonymous decided to take action in support of one of their favored cyber pirates. #OpTPB, Operation The Pirate Bay, was born.

Released concurrently on Anonymous sites CyberGuerrilla and Par:AnoIA, the 5,000-document #OpTPB leak may not represent a complete doxing of the Cambodian government, but it’s enough to cause embarrassment and consternation in Phnom Penh and Stockholm. If nothing else, governments around the world now have to build in “preparing our political excuses” time to any future arrest of a first-tier hacktivist.

In aiming for Cambodia, Anonymous used buckshot instead of smart bombs and hit every target in the geopolitical vicinity, all of whom are going to be angry at Cambodia for the leak (and probably for possessing these documents in the first place).

The documents reflect unfavorably on several governments (not just Cambodia, from whence they were “liberated”), and include Nepalese documentation of drug smuggling from India tied to the Ukrainian and Russian mob. The full downloads are available on the Cyberguerrilla site.

When we questioned Par:AnoIA about the authenticity of one document featured on their leak site, due to its unlikely use of the font Comic Sans, they tweeted back, “Either that or someone would have made up all this data for some hoax. Occam's Razor: Managers love fancy fonts is more likely.”

However mortifying, the invoice from security company EVERSAFE NEPAL to the Indian embassy for surveillance equipment is apparently authentic. Another memo, from the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Indian embassy, summoning one of their staffers to testify in a drug smuggling case, attests to a particular fondness for ostentatious fonts in the diplomatic corps. We’re only surprised there’s no Papyrus.

Other assorted documents include the CVs (PDF) of Nepal’s top generals (and top “Lady Officer”). In total, there are approximately 375 MB of compressed text data available to download. Says Cyberguerrilla (sic), “You will find there lotsa stuff including Combodian and Nepal drug trafficking authorities, army, consulates Kyrghyztan and Ukraine classified documents, Belarus, India etc etc all related to Cambodian authorities and business. Also included internet banking certificate depos and clients which belong to the mentioned authorities.”

And what about Svartholm? The real life situation is even more convoluted than the online one, for once.

Two weeks ago, Svartholm, known online as Anakata, was arrested in his Cambodian apartment. Officially, the premise for the arrest was that his visa had expired. That’s putting it mildly: After he was convicted of copyright violation in 2009, he fled Sweden. His Swedish passport has since been revoked, and an Interpol red notice issued for his arrest. TPB is based in Sweden, and in a more innocent age (2008) Svartholm convinced Julian Assange to move WikiLeaks to Sweden, touting its hands-off approach to the cyber-pioneering.

Svartholm’s situation is looking even worse than Assange’s. Although Cambodia has no formal extradition agreement with Sweden, the Cambodian police said they delivered him to the Swedish embassy in Phnom Penh at the request of the Swedes. The Swedish ambassador claimed to have no knowledge of Svartholm’s whereabouts and strenuously denied he’d been to the embassy.

Earlier, rumors whirled around Twitter that he had already been bundled in a Stockholm-bound plane, but they turned out to be false. He is, instead, reportedly being held in an office at the Ministry of the Interior’s counter-terrorism division.

Now it appears that Svartholm’s arrest may be entirely unrelated to The Pirate Bay or the charges on which he was convicted in 2009. Torrentfreak is reporting that he was taken into custody over a 2010 hack of Logica, a Swedish company that manages taxation for the government. That hack released the tax numbers of more than 9,000 Swedes.

Unsurprisingly, the Swedish embassy hasn’t offered Svartholm legal help. However, Sweden has offered Cambodia $59.4 million in foreign aid Tuesday, in a move that’s not officially related to Svartholm’s arrest.

Although the Cambodian government has announced it would deport Svartholm, it has yet to comment on the possibility of extraditing the TPB cofounder to face charges in Sweden.